New features, a big event, and important announcements marked December as a milestone month for the WordPress community.

Release of WordPress 5.0

On December 6 WordPress 5.0 was released. This release includes the much anticipated new block editor as the default editing experience. While some users have chosen to continue using the Classic Editor on their sites, many site owners have quickly upgraded to this latest version.

Two security and maintenance releases came out over the course of the month, with the latest update providing a huge boost to performance and stability.

The new version of WordPress comes a new default theme: Twenty Nineteen. This theme is designed to highlight how the block editor can be used.

9 Projects for 2019

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg outlined 9 projects for the year 2019. These projects range from creating a block for navigations menus, porting all existing widgets into blocks, forming a triage team to tackle open issues on Trac and more.

A status update for porting existing widgets to blocks has been posted by Mel Choyce.

WordCamp US 2019 Dates announced

WordCamp US 2019 will be held during Nov. 1-3, 2019, in St Louis, Missouri. It will be one of our largest events of the year and will feature Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address.

Plus, our Advanced and Managed Pro Accounts still include 100% free manual backups and upgrades of your WordPress Installation, Themes & Plugins — performed by a WordPress Professional, every week.

And finally, for a big performance boost we’ve also more than doubled the available memory on our SSD servers, so don’t be surprised if you notice your website loading faster than ever!

So whichever of our cPanel Hosting plans is right for you, there’s more than enough room to maintain and grow your WordPress website on West County Media’s consolidated services platform — both now, and for the years to come.

5.0.2 is a maintenance release that addresses 73 bugs. The primary focus of this release was performance improvements in the block editor: the cumulated performance gains make it 330% faster for a post with 200 blocks.

Save the date! The next WordCamp US will be held on November 1-3, 2019, in beautiful St Louis, Missouri. One of our largest events of the year, WordCamp US is a great chance to connect with WordPress enthusiasts from around the world. This is also the event that features Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address.

We’d love to see you in St. Louis next year, so mark your calendar now!

WordPress versions 5.0 and earlier are affected by the following bugs, which are fixed in version 5.0.1. Updated versions of WordPress 4.9 and older releases are also available, for users who have not yet updated to 5.0.

Sam Thomas discovered that contributors could craft meta data in a way that resulted in PHP object injection.

Tim Coen discovered that contributors could edit new comments from higher-privileged users, potentially leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

Tim Coen also discovered that specially crafted URL inputs could lead to a cross-site scripting vulnerability in some circumstances. WordPress itself was not affected, but plugins could be in some situations.

Team Yoast discovered that the user activation screen could be indexed by search engines in some uncommon configurations, leading to exposure of email addresses, and in some rare cases, default generated passwords.

Tim Coen and Slavco discovered that authors on Apache-hosted sites could upload specifically crafted files that bypass MIME verification, leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

Say Hello to the New Editor

We’ve made some big upgrades to the editor. Our new block-based editor is the first step toward an exciting new future with a streamlined editing experience across your site. You’ll have more flexibility with how content is displayed, whether you are building your first site, revamping your blog, or write code for a living.

Building with Blocks

The new block-based editor won’t change the way any of your content looks to your visitors. What it will do is let you insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange to your heart’s content. Each piece of content will be in its own block; a distinct wrapper for easy maneuvering. If you’re more of an HTML and CSS sort of person, then the blocks won’t stand in your way. WordPress is here to simplify the process, not the outcome.

We have tons of blocks available by default, and more get added by the community every day. Here are a few of the blocks to help you get started:

Paragraph

Heading

Preformatted

Quote

Image

Gallery

Cover

Video

Audio

Columns

File

Code

List

Button

Embeds

More

Freedom to Build, Freedom to Write

This new editing experience provides a more consistent treatment of design as well as content. If you’re building client sites, you can create reusable blocks. This lets your clients add new content anytime, while still maintaining a consistent look and feel.

A Stunning New Default Theme

Introducing Twenty Nineteen, a new default theme that shows off the power of the new editor.

Designed for the block editor

Twenty Nineteen features custom styles for the blocks available by default in 5.0. It makes extensive use of editor styles throughout the theme. That way, what you create in your content editor is what you see on the front of your site.

Simple, type-driven layout

Featuring ample whitespace, and modern sans-serif headlines paired with classic serif body text, Twenty Nineteen is built to be beautiful on the go. It uses system fonts to increase loading speed. No more long waits on slow networks!

Versatile design for all sites

Twenty Nineteen is designed to work for a wide variety of use cases. Whether you’re running a photo blog, launching a new business, or supporting a non-profit, Twenty Nineteen is flexible enough to fit your needs.

Developer Happiness

Protect

Blocks provide a comfortable way for users to change content directly, while also ensuring the content structure cannot be easily disturbed by accidental code edits. This allows the developer to control the output, building polished and semantic markup that is preserved through edits and not easily broken.

Compose

Take advantage of a wide collection of APIs and interface components to easily create blocks with intuitive controls for your clients. Utilizing these components not only speeds up development work but also provide a more consistent, usable, and accessible interface to all users.

Create

The new block paradigm opens up a path of exploration and imagination when it comes to solving user needs. With the unified block insertion flow, it’s easier for your clients and customers to find and use blocks for all types of content. Developers can focus on executing their vision and providing rich editing experiences, rather than fussing with difficult APIs.

This release candidate includes a fix for some scripts not loading on subdirectory installs (#45469), and user locale settings not being loaded in the block editor (#45465). Twenty Nineteen has also had a couple of minor tweaks.

Plugin and Theme Developers

Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.0 and update the Tested up to version in the readme to 5.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums so we can figure those out before the final release. An in-depth field guide to developer-focused changes is coming soon on the core development blog. In the meantime, you can review the developer notes for 5.0.

WordPress 5.0 is almost ready for release, including an all-new content editing experience. Volunteers all across the project are gearing up for the launch and making sure everything is ready. Read on to find out what’s been happening and how you can get involved.

WordPress 5.0 Close to Launch

The release date for WordPress 5.0 has not yet been set, but the second release candidate (RC) is now available. The final release date will be determined based on feedback and testing of this RC. The Core development team has been posting daily updates on the progress of their work on v5.0, with the number of open issues for this release decreasing every day.

The primary feature of this release is the new editor that will become the default WordPress experience going forward. A number of people have been seeking more direct feedback from the release leads about the progress of this release, which @matt has facilitated by hosting one-to-one discussions with anyone in the community who wanted to talk with him about it. He has also published an extended FAQ covering many of the questions people have been asking.

Alongside the development of the new editor, the Mobile team has been working hard to bring the WordPress mobile apps up to speed. They plan to make a beta version available in February 2019.

New WordPress Support Platform Goes Live

WordPress user documentation has long been hosted on the WordPress Codex, but for the past couple of years an ambitious project has been underway to move that content to a freshly-built WordPress-based platform. This project, named “HelpHub,” is now live and the official home of WordPress Support.

There is still plenty of content that needs to be migrated from the Codex to HelpHub, but the initial move is done and the platform is ready to have all WordPress’ user documentation moved across. HelpHub will be the first place for support, encouraging users to find solutions for themselves before posting in the forums.

Spanish WordPress Community Pushes Translations Forward

The WordPress community in Spain has been hard at work making sure as much of the WordPress project as possible is available in Spanish. They have recently translated more of the project than ever — including WordPress Core, WordPress.org, the mobile apps and the top 120 plugins in the Directory.

This achievement has largely been possible due to the fact that the Spanish translation team has over 2,500 individuals contributing to it, making it the largest translation team across the whole project.

This is an important milestone, as we near the release of WordPress 5.0. The WordPress 5.0 release date has shifted from the 27th to give more time for the RC to be fully tested. A final release date will be announced soon, based on feedback from this RC. This is a big release and needs your help—if you haven’t tried 5.0 yet, now is the time!